


In the Bleak Midwinter

by SylvanWitch



Series: Proving the Exception [10]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: After the Third bond, M/M, Soul Bond, holiday fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-28
Updated: 2013-11-28
Packaged: 2018-01-02 21:51:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1062045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Phil wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to the aching emptiness of the places in his mind and heart where Clint used to be.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Bleak Midwinter

**Author's Note:**

> A "tango," as established earlier in the series, is an operation on which one or more agents has to pose as the intimate partner or love interest of a mark or other individual under investigation. As a Bonded couple, Phil and Clint are expressly forbidden from participating in "tango" operations, for obvious reasons.

Phil wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to the aching emptiness of the places in his mind and heart where Clint used to be.  It had already been three weeks—three weeks of scant sleep, waking from slumber with the desperate terror that he’d lost his heart, that it had been torn from his chest as surely as Loki’s staff had done.

The difference, of course, was that these scars were invisible.  No one could see the damage Clint’s absence had done to Phil. 

That was the whole point of the exercise.

To say that Phil was tired of their Bond being field-tested would be to engage in egregious understatement of the “Hulk is sometimes destructive” variety.

It’d been more than eight months since they’d been cleared for active duty as a Bonded couple.  More than a year since they’d closed the circuit forever, Clint’s force like electric in his own blood, Clint’s thoughts nestled against his asleep and awake.

Chad had changed the status quo, had shaken Nick’s confidence in their potential.  Had raised threatening questions.

“You have to prove this won’t be a problem, Phil,” Nick had said, his tone as close to pleading as Phil had ever heard it.  That more than anything had sent a wash of cold fear down his back.  If Nick was afraid—not of them but _for_ them—then he and Clint had a serious problem.

 _This_ , as Nick had put it, was what had happened to them on the Chad mission. 

The Chad mission had seemed routine enough—Phil would go in undercover as an arms dealer, make contact with the middle man for the al-Qaeda-funded terrorist group, trace him back to the cell, take down the whole operation.  Clint would be his eyes and ears, ever watchful and vigilant, aided by his innate connection to Phil, able to provide vivid, real-time intel to the HQ in northern Nigeria without mini-cameras that could be discovered or ear-wigs that could inconveniently dislodge during a scuffle.

But the middle man, Hassan, had liked Phil’s look, had made it clear that there were definitely strings attached to any negotiation, and Phil had had no choice but to allow it, despite their tacit agreement with Nick that neither Phil nor Clint would ever work a tango op again.

They were professionals, of course, and Phil had carefully closed off his connection with Clint until the only thing coming to him through the Bond was the raw data of where and when and who.

Unfortunately, despite Phil’s consummate professionalism and legendary control, even he hadn’t been able to prevent Clint from feeling some of what was happening.  Though Phil had managed to sedate Hassan before there’d been penetration, Clint hadn’t been spared strobe-like flashes of strange hands where his alone belonged, strangled sounds wrung from Phil’s reluctant mouth, breath forced like a punch from his lungs when Hassan’s hands had wrapped around Phil’s shaft.

Phil’s discomfort had broken his concentration, showering Clint in loathing and disgust, but there’d been no question of Phil’s loyalty or love—that too had come through in soaking waves of abject apology that had left both of them gasping down the line of their Bond, left them weak-kneed, hollow-eyed, shadows haunting their faces when they deplaned and debriefed and showered together and fell into a sleep wrecked by mirroring dreams of foreign hands reaching out to touch them in places and ways they’d never wanted to be touched.

Phil had breathed “I’m sorry” into Clint’s neck as he’d settled himself deep inside of Clint, had cried it out when Clint had reversed their positions and pushed inside Phil, had murmured it in his sleep and mumbled it around the toothbrush as he avoided his own eyes in the mirror.

“Stop,” Clint had insisted.  “It’s not a big deal.”

But it was.

Which was why they were on week three with no contact, no connection, the Bond sealed as tightly closed as if one of them had died.

They’d done it face to face, eyes fixed to one another as they’d shut down the line of constant, thrumming There-ness between them.

Clint had paled and staggered, hand ghosting over his heart in the same place as Phil’s scar on his chest, clearly remembering the first time the Bond had gone still between them.

Phil had wanted to reach out, take Clint’s hand, touch his face.  But he couldn’t.  They had to be strong, strong enough to prove that they could be Bonded and not break themselves on it.  That when things like Hassan happened, when missions went awry as they so often did and improvising meant intimacy, they’d survive it.

“I don’t like it any more than you do,” Nick had said as Clint prowled a line into the hard floor of his office on the Helicarrier and Phil curled his fingers tightly around the arms of the chair, plastic creaking in protest at his grip.

“Then don’t make us do it,” Clint had snapped, voice a growl.

“That’s not how this works, Agent Barton.”  There’d been as much warning in his tone as in his word choice.  “You’ve got too much rope already.  They’re waiting for you to hang with it.”

Clint had rounded on Nick and advanced on the desk, as if he might leap over it, but Phil had grabbed his wrist, stilled him with the touch and with words communicated silently down the Bond.

“We’ll do it.” Phil said tightly, easing his grip on Clint’s wrist, rubbing soothing circles into his pulse where it beat beneath Phil’s thumb.  “But it’s the last test, Nick.  After we’ve passed this one, we’re done with proving ourselves.  Either we’re good enough for S.H.I.E.L.D. or we’re gone.”

“I don’t know if they’ll accept those terms.”

“Too bad,” Clint and Phil had said together.

“They’ll never let you walk away.”

“You assume they’ll have a choice?” Phil had asked, voice a little amused, dangerous smile on his lover’s face enough to affirm what all three men knew:  The WSC wouldn’t stand a chance of finding Phil and Clint if they didn’t want to be found.

“Fine.  I’ll start the paperwork.  Report to Medical tomorrow morning so they can inject the nano-monitors.”

Those nanites were working their busybody way through the cells and channels of Phil’s body, registering micro-reactions to every conscious second of Clint’s absence, to every subconscious twitch of longing.  Down every empty corridor of his being, Clint’s loss echoed like phantom footsteps, but Phil persevered because he had no other choice.  He hadn’t been lying when he’d said that they could run, escape the WSC’s global reach, find a place to be happy together.

But he’d be damned if he’d be proven too weak for their narrow-minded definition of what was effective in the field.  And Clint had spent most of his life in the shadows.  Phil wouldn’t take him back there if he could help it.

The air was cold in New York that evening, every breath promising snow.  Colored lights wrapped the lampposts in the park as Phil walked by, blind to their beauty.  He passed shop windows bright with tinsel and trees and toys, passed chattering shoppers, arms laden with bags.  Passed carolers and red kettles and a dozen street-side Santa Clauses.

Nothing registered but the steady beating of his heart, which felt like a betrayal.  He shouldn’t be able to breathe at all with the gaping loneliness of not-Clint the only thing keeping him company for the holidays.

Phil deliberately derailed that train of thought.  It only led to him wondering how Clint would be spending Christmas.  Phil had been looking forward to giving Clint holidays like he’d never had—a lighted tree, wrapped gifts, a good meal and better dessert, naked together on a soft rug in front of the fireplace at the cabin he’d been planning to rent.

Here it was Christmas Eve, and Phil was making his way home to his cold apartment from the deli where he’d bought sliced turkey and gravy for the next day’s solo Christmas meal.

He’d considered saying _Fuck it_ , forgetting about the holiday altogether, holing up in his office with mission reports, catching up on incidental paperwork that had been left for after the break.

But at the last minute, he’d realized that that kind of surrender was its own kind of weakness, and even if Nick Fury and the World Security Council never discovered it, even if the nanites recording his heart rate didn’t notice in its sluggish pattern how pathetic Phil felt, Phil would  know, and he didn’t want to be weak that way, didn’t want to disappoint Clint, either, wherever he was, never mind that it was irrational to expect Clint to know what Phil was feeling when the whole point of the test was to determine that Clint could be separated from those feelings and survive just fine.

Shaking off the creeping miasma of self-pity, Phil greeted the doorman, rode the elevator up to the fourteenth floor, keyed in his security code and waited for the retina scan to identify him to its satisfaction.

The moment the door to their apartment clicked open, he knew something was off.  Dropping the deli bag, he reached for the gun he always carried, a little extra-legal number at the small of his back, where it wouldn’t pooch his jacket.

Then recognition staggered him into the door-jamb and he had barely cleared it and kicked the door closed when he was drowning in the scent and touch and taste of Clint, who had driven him back into the wall beside the door and was frantically working Phil’s shirt out of his slacks to get his hands on bare, warm flesh.

Phil groaned, grasping the last of his coherence in a desperate attempt to make words.  “Clint? What—?  The test, we—.”

Clint pulled away long enough to mutter, “Nick says ‘Merry Christmas,’” against his lips, and then his tongue was plundering Phil’s mouth, and Phil was swallowing their mutual groan, and he lost a few minutes as Clint finally— _finally_ —opened the Bond between them, the artificial wall between them exploding into fragments and an urgency of need overcoming Phil’s senses and then rebounding back to Clint, creating a feedback loop that escalated into torn clothing and gasped words and screaming sex on the floor in their front hallway.

Clint was still inside of Phil, softening, his breath a gust against Phil’s sweaty cheek, his voice like whiskey in a broken glass, all dangerous but mellow edges, when he said, “Merry Christmas, Phil,” the sound vibrating through Phil’s chest where Clint lay against him, through his core where they were still joined, through the fullness of the Bond, where Clint connected always, the rightness inexorable and unchanging, eternal and perfect.

“Merry Christmas, Clint,” Phil answered, every ounce of love evident in his raw voice, in the hands that still clutched Clint’s biceps, in the spent seed scenting the air between them, in everything, all of it.

“Best Christmas ever,” Clint declared at last, slipping from Phil with a soft, mutual sigh, rising gracefully, naked, belly slick with Phil’s mess, offering a hand up.

Phil smirked at the wood-burn on Clint’s knees, grimaced at the sharp pain through his lower back where he’d been pounded into the parquet.

“Best Christmas ever,” Phil agreed.

And it was.


End file.
